I’m pleased to be donating a Cable Table to a charity auction organized by Massachusetts General Hospital and the Organization of Minority Residents and Fellows.

 
The event is being held at the Liberty Hotel (on the Red Line, at Charles St)
Friday, February 19, 2010, 7pm
Tickets are $45
Get more info and purchase tickets via Eventbrite.

Also on offer:

 
Oh, look:

New England Patriots players Jerod Mayo and Tyrone McKenzie will be there.

 

Also: Tim Murray, the Lieutenant Governor

 
It should be great fun.
(Even if you can’t make it to the auction, you can still get one on Etsy.)

ONE Condoms are adding a new product to the brand with some sweet packaging mods. The tin (which we are pretty proud of, BTW) maintains it’s awesomeness. Pic below the fold.

I recently attended a dinner party hosted by a friend who was house-sitting. The home-owners happened to own a copy of Bhutan, the largest book in the world. It is, of course, absolutely gorgeous (as it should be, for $30,000). I took some snaps.

 

The closed book is about 5 feet tall by 3 feet. It comes with its own stand. You can read about the project here or here if you are interested.

 
You can buy a lesser version for $2400.89, too, by the way.

 
Those are my friends Steve and Dana, FYI.

 
It is a very, very impressive thing.

A product line (which I co-designed) is so new that it isn’t even Google-able, but it still managed to get itself named a Finalist for the International Housewares Design Awards. Sneak peak below the fold.

 

The Greens are people-themed kitchen goods developed in conjunction with Chris Raia for Boston Warehouse. They are finalists in the Kitchen Tools category, and possibly up for an award for environmentalism. Winners will be announced at the International Housewares Show in February. Whatever happens, were pretty psyched to be nominated. See you in New York!

 
Interestingly, The Greens are made from a recently-developed recycled plastic that incorporates wood as a filler to use less plastic. Don’t worry! It’s safe! And hygienic!

I recently had the opportunity to tour the soon-to-open Design Annex co-working environment in Union Sq, Somerville. It’s a really exciting space focused on helping creatives build a strong community and leverage each other’s skills.

Mimi Graney, of Union Square Main Streets, is heading the non-profit program, which is aimed specifically at professional designers, architects, illustrators, and the like. I have met a number of the prospective members, and it is shaping into a very cool situation.

The space is newly renovated, and right in the center of Union. It’s in the former police station (which inspired the name of Precinct, the bar conveniently located downstairs).

The layout is really fantastic: a large work space with numerous monitor stations (BYO laptop); a generous pin-up wall; kitchen/eating space; locker-space; a privacy room for calls; conference room; and a mezzanine-level library space with an amazing skylight roof. There’s also shared equipment like printers, scanners, spray-booth, and all that. It’s pretty great.

The mezzanine level, with chairs reclaimed from the Somerville Theater

Conference room, the charming Ms. Graney

The space will be open for business in mid-December, and they are actively accepting members. If I didn’t already have a studio (a mere 3 blocks away), I would be all over this.

Congratulations to the team over at ONE: they’ve secured a really great position with Target! Starting next March, ONE Condoms will be available from the retailer nation-wide, and sold, of course, in the packaging designed here at Nerve Action.

To celebrate, I put a sneak peak of ONE’s newest Nerve Action-designed product below the fold.

BTW, if you can’t wait until March, you can always get ONE’s products at most Walgreens, Publix, and Albertson’s locations. If you are in Canada, you can get them at Shopper’s Drug Mart.

Another Canadian bonus: ONE’s new personal lubricant was just released up in the Great White, and we also designed that. Sorry, American friends, you will have to wait for FDA approval (required for all lubes in the US) but here’s a picture, so keep your eyes peeled.

I know! Pretty cool, right?

Clearly, robots evolve. Cylons, for example, first got badder ass and then grew skin. But please, art directors and engineers, you need to stop fetishizing white robots with black mechanical guts.

It’s getting a little played out, dudes.

It begins, as these things do, in Japan

OK, so here were are in 1987, and anime is about to break out big. One of the biggest is going to be Ghost In The Shell, by Masamune Shirow. (Careful: the trailer has cartoon boobs.) By the way, that’s cybernetic armor on a (naked) human, not a full-on robot, but you can see where this is going.

Maybe they’re white because Iceland is cold

 
Jump ahead a decade, and Björk is having (the amazing) Chris Cunningham direct the video for All Is Full Of Love. It’s all about sexy girl-bots that build each other and then fall in love and make out. (Careful: robot boobs.) Looks pretty similar, right? However, this is clearly an homage, and Cunningham has taken the aesthetic in an entirely new direction. And AND, Cunningham made all those sick Aphex Twin videos, not to mention this Japanese psycho-ward mini-film featuring a talking dog for Squarepusher, so it’s cool.

After the apex, the downward trajectory accelerates quickly

So now pretend you are Alex Proyas, circa 2004. You helmed Dark City, so your visual creativity is rather beyond questioning. You are about to make an adaptation of I, Robot, the beloved Asimov novel. Who do you tap to be your art director? Oh, how about someone who did not one, but two Ernest movies? That will DEFINITELY get you something exciting in the robot-taxonomy department.

A hero runs afoul

Stan Winston, you were awesome. You absolutely pushed the art forward. You earned 4 Academy Awards. You were better than a pseudo-sexy-girl-robot ripoff-ad that got slapped on the sides of buses. I hope the Times is lying and you didn’t do this. No, wait, it’s (unlinkably) posted in your portfolio.

It ends, as these things do, in Japan

The white-shell-over-black-joints trend has become completely pervasive, and utterly thoughtless. Is it surprising that engineers keep beating this particular dead horse/labor-saving-device?

I leave you with what I can only hope is the final, inbred, malformed freak of this gnarled branch of the robo-evolutionary tree:

 
The Mass Innovation Night presentation went great, as I mentioned previously. While I was there, PermissionTV walked around to each booth, asking us to yell into the camera. Never one to reject internet publicity, of course I acquiesced.

It’s up now, although sadly without embedding. However, check it out.

Last night’s Mass Innovation Night was an interesting experiment, and quite successful. Chris Raia and I used the event as an opportunity to test out a new project, the Urban Animal Design Collaborative, and we got a lot of great feedback.

Chris and I have long been considering a joint venture that would allow us to make our collaborative efforts a bit more formal, while maintaining independent business structures as needed. Additionally, we are interested in supporting other independents whose skills are frequently required during the product development process, such as engineers, graphic designers, and photographers.

At MassInno we presented both our mutual and individual work under the Urban Animal mantle to the trade-show-esque audience, and the responses were very interesting. A lot of people asked really excellent questions or suggested alternative marketing approaches. One individual had even attempted the same model in the IT arena (with limited success). If any of you, Dear Readers, have thoughts on the subject, I would of course be intrigued to hear them.

The event itself was well organized and attended, and the presenters more varied than the previous event, which made it even more enjoyable. I had a hard time peeling away from our table in order to fully check out the others, but ThinkMagic’s USB RFID reader was very cool, as was Canson’s Papershow “digital paper” system. Also, there were Popsicles. And perhaps that is the definition of success.

Gonna be at the Mass Innovation Night trade-show-slash-science-fair again this month. BUT: this time from the other side of the business-card-fumbling. We’re there as part of the Urban Animal Design Collaborative, a new-ish venture that allows independent creatives to market their skills in concert, thereby offering a more complete package of services than any individual member could on their own.

The event is Wednesday, June 10, from 6 to 8:30 at Waltham’s Museum of Industry & Innovation, and it should be a lot of fun. Word is they are going to have “refreshments” this time. You should hit that up.

The organizing group is pretty socially networked, and attendees will be tweeting with the #MIN3 hashtag, if that’s your thing. Be great to see you there.